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Month: September 2016

The lesson that games can teach us is simple. Games aren’t appealing because they are fun, but because they are limited. Because they erect boundaries. Because we must accept their structures in order to play them. Soccer sees two teams of eleven players attempting to use their feet, torsos, and heads to put a ball into a goal. Tetris asks you to position falling arrangements of four orthogonally-connected squares in order to produce and remove horizontal lines. And yet the experiences games like soccer and Tetris create are far larger than those boundaries convey on their own. That boundary results from the deliberate, if absurd, pursuit of soccer and Tetris on their own terms, within the limitations they erect. The limitations make games fun.

What if we treated everything the way we treat soccer and Tetris – as valuable and virtuous for being exactly what they are, rather than for what would be convenient, or for what we wish they were instead, or for what we fear they are not? Walks and meadows, aunts and grandfathers, zoning board of appeals meetings and business trips. Everything. Our lives would be better, bigger, more meaningful, and less selfish.

For the manifestation, the “manifestation identifier” that is listed is most commonly the ISBN. This is an important data element, but I do wonder how often users (including library staff) approach the library catalog with an ISBN in hand (or head). The ISBN is, however, heavily utilized in automated processes, such as duplicate detection and retrieval of cover images from online sources. Because there is no definition of users in the document, it is not possible to know whom the group had in mind for the various data elements, nor can we know if some bibliographic attributes were specifically intended for automated processing.

The statement of responsibility is among the elements that have a moderate role for “find a manifestation.” This is not a heading in library data, and I am confused by the assumptions the FRBR Study Group makes regarding the action of “finding.” In fact, the report does not mention indexing, nor whether there is even an assumption that there are headings. Yet the find action does imply that some ability to search must exist, and the Final Report describes the elements of moderate value for find as those “typically used as a secondary search term.” It isn’t clear what “secondary search term” means, but presumably this is a term that can be used to limit results, as with the use of limiting elements in many catalogs by language, resource type, or other characteristic. The Study Group clearly harbored some implicit assumptions about system capabilities, but what these are is not made clear.

The moral choices we make in the game project backward as well as forward. Aviary Attorney is an inconsistent-reality game. Jayjay Falcon’s background is a mystery in every playthrough, but the truth ultimately revealed changes depending on what you decide to have him do. I know some players find that kind of thing extremely irritating, wanting all branches of a game to work together to reveal the same backstory from different angles. I did not find it bothersome myself, especially because Jayjay’s projected backstory is dependent on a choice he makes at a critical moment: essentially the player is deciding what kind of person he is, and thus perhaps what kind of person he used to be.

Aaron: Nobody understands why a gazetteer is important until they suddenly need one and then they’re, like, wait, oh what, how do we…

Paul: That’s been the miracle of the web, to me, right, it’s that you’d be like I want to build this thing and then you very rapidly stumble into the need for a large set of data with a lot of tasks. Like, I need historical texts or I need a list of places or whatever and it’s just amazing how often you get back to that.

And that whole part of our world is surprisingly untended. Right? And you go, oh get this a list of businesses but it’s from 2010 and no one has adopted it since. I’ve been actually thinking, like there isn’t really, as far as I can tell – maybe you know better than I would, but there’s an idea that I’m going to adopt this open source project, or give this into to the commons, or I’m going to open this thing but there’s no culture of adopting big data sets and taking care of them in the same way as there is as putting things on github and doing releases as open source software… that I know about.

….

[34:10]

Aaron: I guess the example of people who are doing that are the New York Public Library.

Aaron: … and then providing tools for letting people work in little atomic units but even then some of it is a question of scale, I mean for all that the NYPL does amazing work they’re pretty reluctant to offer those services outside of New York City.

Paul: No, of course. What’s bugging me is I think that everyone sees code as the infrastructure for creativity and doing new work online, and I think it’s also data, and we don’t really, that’s not a conversation that people really have that much.

If ours is the Information Age, it is not the first. A “quantifying spirit” swept the educated classes of 18th century Europe, too, as they confronted the hyperabundance of data in an increasingly globalized world. 1 Explorers were returning from distant lands with new bytes of information — logs, maps, specimens — while, back home, Europeans turned natural history into a leisure pursuit. 2 Hobbyists combed the fields for flowers to press and butterflies to pin. Scientists and philosophers sought rational modes of description, classification, and analysis — in other words, systematicity.

That age belonged to Carl Linnaeus, whose methods we still use to name new species. (Swedish botanist, zoologist, physician: what box should we put him in?) Linnaean classification proved a “godsend to naturalists at sea in the quantity of their own discoveries,” 3 but that was just the start; its “rationality and practicality gave it entrée everywhere.” 4 Researchers applied its systematic logic to the study of everything from chemicals and diseases to machines and algebraic forms.

The craze reached its height, as ours does, with a most protean subject: clouds